Random House Book Blogger Brunch (16th June 2012)

July 17, 2012

Wow, I should really write up these events sooner! But nevermind, here goes! A month ago I was invited to an event at the Random House Childrens Publishers (RHCP) Pimlico office. The event was to highlight the RHCP titles due out in the second half of 2012 and early 2013. I love all publisher events but I think this one was by far my favourite so far, so interesting and they had great food, which is always a bonus!

Anyway, I started off getting up at silly o clock for my 6.20 train. I got to London at around 10 and made my way to the Pimlico tube station, there I found Clover from Fluttering Butterflies, which was awesome as Clover is one of the first bloggers I talked to online and I’d never met her! Soon after we were joined by Lucy, Faye, Carly, Viv, M, Sarah, Sammie, Kirsty, Sophie and Jesse (among others I’m sure but my brains gone now and it was too long ago so I can’t remember! Sorry!) and we made our way to the offices. There we mingled a bit before taking a seat for the presentation!

The books talked about all sounded awesome, I’m not going to go into much detail just because it’ll take up a lot of writing and you’ll probably get bored of my rambling. Instead I made the below slideshow just to highlight them and their release dates, a list of books and the links to their goodreads page is at the end of the post.

(sorry about the abrupt ending of the music…)

Following on from the chat about these books we got some 2013 book info in the form of Boys Don’t Cry 2, The Oathbreaker’s Shadow which is a Game of Thrones for teens apparently, The Lost Girl a new YA Dystopian and Darby Burdock, but more about her later. We also got casting news about The Seventh Son film which is based on the first Spooks Apprentice book and will star Kit Harrington *drools*

Once these books were talked about a bit we had a great video from Malorie Blackman talking about the second Boys Don’t Cry book which will be out next year, it was so funny and made me love Malorie even more than I did already!

After that a couple of girls from the design department talked to use about how covers are designed, Crusher’s cover is one that was talked about because the publication of Crusher has moved so quickly that they only had two weeks to design it, whereas they usually have months! It was really interesting to see where they got the inspiration from with the style coming from adult crime authors like Lee Child and Ian Rankin and the font coming from a video game cover. I loved the different ideas they talked about that they had! The covers for the three books in the Flappers series were talked about too and with this one is was even more interesting because they did a proper photo shoot for it! I liked the different covers here too and you could really tell how much thought went into the covers, even down to which way the model should be facing and which side of the cover she should be on. It was interesting to know that it’s actually the same girl on all three covers and there was just different wigs and outfits involved!

Then we had a break, in which Krispie Kremes were eaten, following the nomming the wonderful folks from Vintage came to talk to us about the new imprint of children’s classics they are launching. They are rebranding the children’s classics with new covers and interesting additions to the books like quizzes and stuff. It was interesting to know about the research that had been put in, especially for the covers as they wanted them to appeal to modern day children more then older versions of the classics. I loved finding out more about how the marketing side of things worked and how they wanted to include more modern books into the classics range like The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Below is a video they made about the new imprint.

Last but not Least we got to meet Laura Dockrill, author of Darcy Burdock which is coming early next year form the MG/younger teen audience. Laura is fantastic and I loved her as soon as she walked in just because of her awesome style! Laura told us a bit about the book and read out an extract and honestly all I can say is BUY THIS BOOK! It sounds amazing and so so funny! I don’t generally read MG girls books but this is one that has to be read just from the extract!

Then we mingled more, ate more doughnuts and red velvet cupcakes (that Harriet needs a shout out for, they were AMAZING!) and got moved on, to the pub next door! The pub was brilliant too and we were joined by Laura Dockrill and two of the lovely girls from the editorial department (I know one was called Lauren and I can’t remember the other, *shame face*) and had a great chat!

It was such a great event but I completely forgot to take any pictures at all, I’m so useless! However you can read a write up from Viv at Serendipity Reviews here and look at her great pics and also read a write up from Jesse at Books4Teens here!